BRING IT! #8

Humanity+ Silicon Valley Chapter MeetUp, organized by Peter RothmanHumanity+ is an international nonprofit membership organization that advocates the ethical use of technology to expand human capacities. This will be the first MeetUp of the Silicon Valley chapter.

Three guest speakers will include:

Natasha Vita-More, The Need for Transhumanist Innovations: Why Designers and Entrepreneurs need a Transhumanist Approach to Their Innovations

Jason FeKaylius Wilson, Games for Disembodied Eyesight

Zoltan Istvan, Everyone Faces Their Own Transhumanist Wager

The event will start with a 30 minute informal networking period. Speakers will start promptly at 6:30 PM and there will be limited time for Q&A.

The Need for Transhumanist Innovations: Why Designers and Entrepreneurs need a Transhumanist Approach to Their Innovations

Natasha Vita-More, PhD will present remotely via video. Natasha is the Board Chair of Humanity+ and is a frequent guest speaker on topics concerning the future and technology. Natasha is founder of esDESIGN and best known for creating the first future human prototype “Primo Posthuman”. Her writings have been published in numerous books, she has appeared in more than twenty-four televised documentaries, and featured in magazines including The New York Times, Wired, Village Voice, Flaunt, Harper’s Bazaar, U.S. News & World Report, Net Business, and Teleopolis. Natasha is a Fellow at Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, Fellow at Hybrid Reality Institute, Track Advisor to the Singularity University, and on the Scientific Board of Lifeboat Foundation. She was formerly president of Extropy Institute from 2002-2005. As a bit of history, Natasha authored the “Transhuman Manifesto” (1983), Create/Recreate: the 3rd Millennial Culture (cybernetic culture and the future of humanism and the arts and sciences). In the early 1990s, she produced and hosted the transhumanist TV show “Transcentury Update” and she is the host and producer of H+TV.

Games for Disembodied Eyesight

Jason FeKaylius Wilson will talk with Peter Rothman about the evolution of his ideas and experiences building an interactive game platform for people who are having a technologically induced out-of-body-experience. What do these games tell us about the nature of mind, embodiment, and personal identity? What about religious experiences? Jason and Peter will discuss what is very likely the largest human experiment on the cognitive effects of telepresence ever conducted.

As an artist, hacker and entrepreneur Jason uses information, context and expectation to put your subjectivity into perspective. His work has taken the forms of environments, events, publicity stunts, art gangs, web based communities, ephemera, performance, audio perfume and now as a game platform for disembodied play called OuterBody Labs.

His works has been featured at Martial ART, Manifesta Frankfurt, The National Geographic Society, the Lost Horizon Night Market, Burning Man, Life 3.0, Augmented Reality Event, DorkBotSF, WhereCampSF, The Singularity Summit, Come Out and Play SF, Science Gallery Dublin, The Russian Polytechnic Museum Moscow, Treasure Island Music Festival, TV of Tomorrow, CODAME SF, SubZero Festival San Jose, SF Pride Festival, Jack London Square, The All World's Fair, Sea of Dreams, Oakland Art Murmur and the Extreme Futurist Festival LA.

Everyone Faces Their Own Transhumanist Wager

Zoltan Istvan, author of philosophical bestseller The Transhumanist Wager, will discuss his novel and why everyone faces their own transhumanist wager in life.

Bestselling visionary author Zoltan Istvan, an American-Hungarian, began a solo, multi-year sailing journey around the world at the age of 21. His main cargo was 500 handpicked books, mostly classics. He's explored over 100 countries—many as a journalist for the National Geographic Channel—writing, filming, and appearing in dozens of television stories, articles, and webcasts. His work has also been featured by The New York Times Syndicate, Outside, San Francisco Chronicle, BBC Radio, NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, Animal Planet, and the Travel Channel. In addition to his award-winning coverage of the war in Kashmir, he gained worldwide attention for pioneering and popularizing the extreme sport of volcano boarding. Zoltan later became a director for the international conservation group WildAid, leading armed patrol units to stop the billion-dollar illegal wildlife trade in Southeast Asia. Back in America, he started various successful businesses, from real estate development to filmmaking to viticulture, joining them under ZI Ventures. He is a philosophy and religious studies graduate of Columbia University and resides in San Francisco with his daughter and physician wife. Zoltan recently published The Transhumanist Wager, a fictional thriller describing apatheist Jethro Knights and his unwavering quest for immortality via science and technology

The host for this event will be Peter Rothman is the editor of the H+ Magazine, http://hplusmagazine.com/, which describes itself as "covering technological, scientific, and cultural trends that are changing - and will change - human beings in fundamental ways". Peter will be participating in the Hangout from California. Peter is an engineer and software developer with over two decades of experience. He was an early developer of virtual reality and simulation technology, streaming media, data visualization, and other systems and won an award for his research for the US Army. He currently develops machine learning, text analysis, and data visualization software. He uses a prototype code base called CLIO to find articles for H+. His best known recent project was the award winning iPad app StockTouch on which he consulted during the initial product development.

Humanity+ Silicon Valley Chapter MeetUp is part of ZERO1 summer program BRING IT! Each week this summer, we’re handing over the ZERO1 Garage to innovative artists and community members who are pushing the boundaries of digital culture, using art to address real-world social challenges, and contributing to the community of creativity and innovation that Silicon Valley is known for.